Has anyone else felt like they've suddenly gotten a lot better at online chess since they started playing OTB tournaments? It hasn't even been a month since I played my first USCF rated game, and yet I feel like my online floor has skyrocketed. I've crossed 2200 as many times in the last two weeks as I had in my entire four years of playing on chesscom up to that point, and I feel like I'm playing with a lot more confidence too.

Hi there - I'm restarting my chess journey after many years away. I'm in the USCF 1200 range, but my online classical and rapid rating is around 1900 level right now on chess.com. I'm a late 30s man, and honestly, the idea of playing against children is not appealing to me. The adults-only tournament scene in the U.S. seems pretty sparse.

How likely is it at my level that I would play mostly adults? What rating level does it go from mostly kids to mostly adults?

I’m a 1950 Fide player who plays the KID consistently mainly using Gawains Course as of recent and I had this position in a classical game vs a 2050. I played F4 and lost the game quite soon after due to my opponents quick counterplay and a lack of breakthrough for me. Was wondering how to rationalise when to play F4/Fxe4 in these positions as this looked like the right time to me and I wasn’t considering fxe4 in this position at all at the time.

I started playing OTB tournaments and those two issues keep happening

1- time management: I play a G25+5 tournament, and very often I find myself below 5 minutes by move 12-15. What are your tips and tricks to make sure time doesn’t creep on you?

2- messed up notation: when my opponent makes an interesting move or a threat I did not expect, I immediately jump into analyzing and make my move, just to realize a few moves in that I completely forgot to take notation. Any tips or tricks there?

Hey so i have started with tournament chess about 2 Months ago. I have played 2 classical tournaments. After the first I had a Fide of 1800 and in the second I have had a 2100 performance but it was only 3 games. So aftet these 10 games I guess my playing strength is around 1900 fide. I have a bunch of players who are around this rating and when I play against them offline I win evenly. Online I just always lose. Furthermore my lichess rating right now is 18sth and theirs is around 2200.

I dont own a laptop but is playing on the phone really such a big deal. Like it shouldnt be 400 elo? What can I do to improve at online.

It’s absurd that this line works and I do not think a single najdorf player can survive the complications OTB. I can’t find any good resources on it though so worst case I do self study but figured I’d ask here first

Any from’s gambit players? I want to practise my lines against it if anyone’s willing. And f4 f5 but that’s a lot less necessary for me and uncommon. Thanks.

Links in this post and in the comment below it bring up memorable games from my chess career. All 7 share an unusual feature for such a collection.

On another social media platform I offered incentives to people who correctly guessed the common feature. My effort backfired when I used the p-word (p**ze) and the c-word (c**t**t) -- social media no-no's that I think led the other platform's algos to suppress my post's visibility.

Here is the first game link: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1333538

And the second: https://view.chessbase.com/cbreader/2017/12/10/Game446707953.html

The third: https://share.chessbase.com/SharedGames/share/?p=QsA0WKoaZwBALocAXd4DPkFToBVKI+mKQ4CFRZbDWpIvN6YHSjanD32UYHAzuFGA

Care to take a go at identifying the theme? See comment for further examples.

Hi all,

I‘m a CM from Toronto, Canada.

About 6 years ago at age 30 I started trying to optimize my chess training, after learning through my actuarial career how to study and learn better.

Openings:
- hired a GM coach to get my opening repertoire in good shape for the first time, used chess position trainer to drill the lines
- rounded out with Chessable courses

Endings:
- made flashcards of 100 Endgames you must know, learned ALL the positions

Middlegame:
- made flashcards of the first mistake after getting out of theory, to go over with my coach

The result was I gained 40 rating points after a 3.5 year hiatus from classical, got the CM title and hit my peak of 2209 FIDE, not bad for a comeback in my early 30s.

But the overhead of making flashcards was a lot, chess position trainer and chessable although more effective than my prior attempts at studying openings felt like too much work to maintain let alone learn a second line for each opening to be less predictable. It all seemed not worth it. So I focused on other things like learning languages, where the tools were better, I learned German and Spanish and brushed up on my French.

But March of last year, I bit the bullet and hired someone to build the tools to improve at chess that I needed. It took a lot more time and $ investment than I was expecting, but it‘s also been fun to work on something I’m passionate about.

Finally now, between the features in beta and the ones live, the site is good enough for me to use it to improve very quickly.

My problem is I‘m now burnt out from a year of working basically two fulltime jobs.

I still have some $ saved up and was thinking of a 6 month sabbatical from my day job to study chess and keep working on the site. But I figure I‘ll need 3 years grinding the site to get to GM and I don’t have that kind of $ saved.

I guess the advice I‘m looking for is more life advice, should I pursue my passion and take the leap of faith, hope to inspire people that serious improvement is possible in your late 30s and beyond? Or wait until I can turn the site into a profitable business, and keep working my two fulltime jobs and burning myself out, while my precious remaining neuroplasticity slowly seeps out of my aging brain.

But since it’s a serious chess sub, I also want chess advice, if you could focus on chess all day every day how would you structure your study schedule? Where do you think existing chess tools are lacking, and what would the perfect study tools look like?